Family and neighbours express disbelief as unassuming 58-year-old aviation
electrician alleged to be new face of Islamic terror in American heartland

To his neighbours in the quiet residential neighbourhood where he has lived since 1979, he was the quiet but polite man with the unkempt front garden. To his adult son, he was a "regular dad".

But to their amazement, Terry Loewen is the unlikely new face of alleged Islamic home-grown terror after he was charged with plotting a pre-Christmas suicide bombing mission at the Kansas airport where he worked as an aviation electrician.

Mr Loewen was arrested as he arrived early on Friday at Mid-Continent Airport in Wichita in a car that he thought was packed with explosives As the name of the airport indicates, this is the American heartland, far away from the usual targets for terrorist plots and breeding grounds for extremism.

The terminal at the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport (Reuters)

His arrest shots show a bespectacled 58-year-old white man who looks as unassuming as relatives and friends describe him. His family knew that he had recently converted to Islam, but he did not wear religious garb or share radical thoughts with them.

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But according to prosecutors, Mr Loewen had been hatching a plot to use his airport access to blow up civilian planes with the help of an undercover FBI agent he met on a pro-jihad website.

"By the time you read this I will – if everything went as planned – have been martyred in the path of Allah," Mr Loewen is said to have written in a note left for his family.

"There will have been an event at the airport which I am responsible for. The operation was timed to cause maximum carnage and death."

Mr Loewen drew inspiration online from Osama bin Laden and Anwar al Awlaki, the extremist preacher killed by a drone strike in Yemen last year, according to the criminal complaint. Coaxed by the undercover agent, he developed the bomb plot and received what he believed were explosives from him for Friday's planned operation.

Mr Loewen now faces one count of trying to use a weapon of mass destruction, one count of attempting to damage property and one count of attempting to provide material support to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

His 24-year-old son Damien shook his head in disbelief as he tried to reconcile his loving father with a terror suspect.

"He's a really good guy. I mean, I never thought he'd do something like this," he told local television. "He was always really calm and a loving man.

"I want him to know that I love him and I hope the best for him. I mean, he's got to serve his time for what he's done, but I wish he would've thought about us just a little bit more."

Neighbours of Mr Loewen and his second wife Deborah were just as stunned.

"I can't believe it," Richard McKown told The Wichita Eagle . "This is a pretty close-knit neighbourhood, but they kind of kept to themselves. You'd see them come and go. Sometimes they'd wave. Sometimes they wouldn't."

As they watched FBI investigators in white protective overalls enter and leave the couple's nondescript brick bungalow, they were adamant that they had never seen anything suspicious there.

"You're kidding," said Kyia Reed, who moved there four months ago. "We just went trick-or-treating down there a month or so ago. It's a normal house, normal decorations. We saw him and his wife, both normal people."